Do you think a company w less diversified source of income would be willing to take more risk, knowing that room for error is very small?
I can’t think of a single example where a super large company gets more willing to take risks when it gets larger. Theres probably a few exceptions but I can’t think of any.
as I said in another comment : These large firms do not take risk.
The larger the corporation, the more risk adverse they are.
But sure, look at big tech with a money printing machine, insane margins and revenue. Amazon spends 90b a year on r&d (~14% of revenue). Meta is about 26% of revenue and so on.
That's risk as it's not tied to their core business and most if not all is punted away.
Can you give me a citation of a small company willing to punt 14-24% of their revenue on long term projects that may not bare any results?
Meta essentially replaced myspace, which basically went down hill after being bought out by a much larger company.
Meta created and support React which runs much of the internet. Pytorch, which runs most AI models. GraphQL, Jest, Llama (one of the first open weights models) and more that I can't remember.
What are you talking about?
An engineer who worked at Meta did some stuff on his personal Github and managed to get them to adopt it. They weren't being innovative, they got someone else to do the prototyping and then brought it in.
Much like the same conversation about other large organisations that buy to "innovate".
> ...Pytorch
Didn't they just hire some of the maintainers of Torch7, who had started on the rework of implementing lessons learnt and migration to Python? So you while you could say they "created PyTorch", it would be quite misleading.
R&D spend does not correlate with innovation or creativity. It’s surprising what gets counted as R&D in a big company.
Small companies have to have an innovative product in order to compete with the big fish who operate economies of scale.
R&D spend does correlate with innovation and creativity. It’s surprising what it takes to consider something as R&D in a big company.